Julian Aguon went into law to be a voice for people on the front lines of climate change and injustice, including his own Chamorro community in Guam. “I wanted to work really deliberately at the intersection of human rights and environmental justice,” he says. But that job didn’t exist — so, still in his 20s, he started his own law firm. Blue Ocean Law works throughout Oceania to maximize legal protections for Indigenous people trying to thrive on their ancestral lands.

“This is a spectacularly diverse, incredibly rich region of the world that is really underserved when it comes to lawyers paying attention to potential and real human rights violations,” he says. One of his firm’s first objectives was battling multinational corporations exploring deep-sea mining, which threatens to disrupt lifeways for Pacific Islanders and release methane buried in the seafloor. Aguon believes the industry would have taken off already if not for legal and activist opposition.

In one of its biggest cases, the firm is lead counsel for the Republic of Vanuatu, asking the International Court of Justice in the Hague to clarify what legal obligations all countries have to act on climate change. In March, the U.N. passed a resolution seeking an opinion from the court; when it’s released, the decision could impact lawsuits against governments for climate inaction. As Aguon puts it, “The law suffers from severe limitations, but on occasion it can be magnificent.”

Aguon is also a writer. His recent book, No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, explores his personal journey with loss, as well as themes of colonialism and climate justice. “Literature does something that the law cannot do,” he says. “We have to have, at all times, one foot in the other world — the world we’re trying to hasten into being.”

Lylianna Allala is Seattle’s first municipal climate justice director. But, she says, “my pathway into policy work was really roundabout.” She studied English in college, thinking that she might someday teach Chicano literature. Instead, after graduating, she applied for a position with EarthCorps, a Peace Corps-like program for environmental leadership headquartered in Seattle. She didn’t fully know what she was getting herself into when she signed up — but the experience changed her life.

For many years, Allala’s work focused on ecology: tree planting, stream restoration, and public land access. Then, in 2015, Seattle launched an unprecedented Equity and Environment Initiative, working with community groups to deepen its commitment to racial and environmental justice. At the time, Allala was working for a nonprofit: “My focus was on increasing equitable pathways for Black and brown folks into environmental jobs,” she says. Serving as a community partner for the city’s initiative started Allala’s journey into policy. “Fast forward, now I’m the climate justice director in that same office, and I’m responsible for continuing that body of work that I helped inform.”

Since she started working for the city in 2019, Allala has not only overseen the growth of the Equity and Environment Initiative, but helped champion a Green New Deal, which the mayor signed into law last fall. “Working in the city allows me to more deeply understand the levers of change that are available to community members to advance collective change for good,” she says. And although she’s not teaching literature, storytelling remains part of her work. In 2020, Allalla helped launch the Growing Old Project, a podcast that imagines what a future Seattle could look like, built on a foundation of sustainability and equity that’s being laid today.

Danny Cage was interested in politics from a young age. As a kid, he watched C-SPAN for fun — while acknowledging that the average adult would probably be “bored out of their mind” by it.

His entry into climate activism came in 2019 with the global youth school strikes inspired by Greta Thunberg. Cage started out as a protester and gradually moved into organizing. He landed a spot on the policy committee of the Portland Public Schools Board of Education — and discovered that a climate crisis response policy had been languishing in committee for years.

Working with other students and community members, he became a champion for the policy, which includes net-zero goals, emissions tracking, and climate education. Cage pushed to ensure that students’ voices and priorities were represented. “Young people are stakeholders, but are not treated as stakeholders,” he says. After over 20 drafts, the board passed the policy in March 2022.

Later that year, at just 18, Cage became the youngest person appointed to Oregon’s Environmental Justice Council, where he’s helping create the state’s first environmental justice mapping tool. Continuing to represent youth voices has been meaningful to him, as has hearing from peers inspired by his success. When people reach out, Cage says, “I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve done it, so you can absolutely do it, too, and let’s figure out how to do that.’”

Cage graduated from high school this year and remains focused on local action. He ran for and won a seat on the board of directors for Multnomah Education Service District — again becoming the youngest member — and plans to attend Portland Community College. He says: “I definitely feel like I want to maintain the connections that I currently have, and the trust from my community.”

To Marqus Cole, the evangelical Christian community and the climate movement have more in common than either might think. Cole is the director of church and community engagement at the Evangelical Environmental Network, a nonprofit that educates Christians about environmental action.

“We try to help people see that we were always called to care for creation,” says Cole, “help them rediscover that their identity as a believer does not have to be at odds with the climate crisis, and that we’re actually called to be helping communities on the front lines.”

While working as a legal aid in Chicago shortly after graduating law school, Cole recognized how climate change impacted his clients, who were burdened by excessive energy bills and the health impacts of urban heat. At work, environmental and social justice were spoken about in tandem. But at church, Cole never heard anything about the climate crisis.

He realized that faith groups and the climate movement could learn a lot from one another. “In the secular world, I would see so many folks get burnt out or lose hope, but in my faith story, things are bad, but there’s hope.”

Cole’s job now is to talk to Christians about the climate crisis and offer tools that can help them galvanize their congregations to take action. “I have a lot of coffee with people,” he said. “We talk about scripture, but then we talk about science and solutions.” He also creates online resources and coordinates book clubs and a film festival to engage evangelicals on climate issues.

He knows that not everyone in his faith community will embrace the intersectionality of Christianity and environmentalism. “We don’t need everyone right now to come along, but we need enough people right now to vote for policies and solutions that will impact our trajectory.”

Leo Goldsmith had a passion for health advocacy from a young age. At his parents’ suggestion, he briefly pursued premed in college, but soon switched to environmental studies. “I looked back at my entrance essays and found that I wasn’t even talking about being a doctor,” he says. “I was talking about food justice and how the environment impacts health.”

As a graduate student, Goldsmith recognized an oversight in academic literature about health and environmental risk. It didn’t address queer populations — or the unique economic, social, and health disparities they face. Goldsmith was also going through their own gender transition at the time, and experiencing discrimination from housing and healthcare providers.

Working with a professor and another researcher, Goldsmith wrote and published one of the first papers examining how those disparities translate to vulnerability in the face of climate impacts.

“Before that, I didn’t even know that was something I could do,” Goldsmith says. They’ve since been asked to speak at academic conferences, briefed White House officials, and worked with FEMA and NOAA to organize webinars on disaster mitigation and response for queer communities. Goldsmith also contributed to this year’s National Climate Assessment, marking the first time the report has ever mentioned LGBTQ+ populations.

This fall, Goldsmith began a PhD at Yale exploring specific health impacts on queer populations. “There’s no research at all, for example, on how extreme heat might uniquely affect LGBTQ+ individuals, especially trans folks,” he says. He hopes to begin building a body of data that can inform solutions tailored to queer communities.

When Nicole Horseherder returned home to the Navajo Nation after college, she discovered that the springs she had grown up with had disappeared. “How am I going to raise a family without water?” she wondered. “How am I going to raise livestock?” But rather than dwelling on those questions, she wanted to know what was depleting the area’s aquifers. “I found out that the source of the problem is coal mining.”

In the early 2000s, Horseherder helped create Tó Nizhóní Ání, an advocacy org whose name means “sacred water speaks” in her native Diné language. She began working with her community to oppose the coal companies that were draining groundwater to support their mining operations. After many intense years of campaigning, their organizing led the Navajo Nation to stop supplying water to the Mojave Generating Station in Nevada — and, ultimately, the station’s shutdown in 2005. “That was the first major win of our organization,” she recalls. More recently, she helped retire the Navajo Generating Station and the Black Mesa and Kayenta mines in 2019. And she did that work as a volunteer for 17 years, while working a day job in the local school district.

“I just couldn’t sit by and allow the misuse and mismanagement of our water,” Horseherder says. Finally, in 2017, she secured enough funding to create a full-time position for herself as the director of the organization, and today she employs seven people plus a handful of contractors.

Horseherder focuses on educating people about what’s really happening with their land and water. From there, she says, the community can come together and decide the best course of action. “It very much respects and honors the traditional way of decision-making among our people.”

When Alexia Leclercq was a student at New York University in 2019, she attended a climate education expo where nearly all the curricula emphasized climate science — not climate justice.

Leclerq understood the value of environmental justice education from her time with People Organized in Defense of Earth and Her Resources, or PODER, in Austin, Texas. She’d helped fight the construction of a nearby fuel storage facility and campaigned to bring clean, affordable water to a community that lacked access to it. “I got to learn a lot from elders in the community in terms of how to organize and go about addressing these issues,” says Leclercq.

She decided to design a syllabus for K–12 students focused on justice, advocacy, and mobilization. A high school in the Bronx adopted it, and after word got around, other educators reached out about crafting a curriculum for their schools, too. That led to the creation of Start:Empowerment, the climate education initiative that Leclercq cofounded.

Start:Empowerment provides schools with project-based climate justice learning programs. Students do activities like mapping areas with toxic pollution and overlaying that information with data on race and class. “We have them think and come to their own conclusions about what it means,” she says.

As the organization expanded, it encountered school districts less receptive to climate education, and so Start:Empowerment began offering out-of-school programming, too.

“There’s a bigger, systemic change that needs to happen in the education field,” says Leclercq, who also recently completed a master’s in education with a focus on liberatory pedagogy at Harvard University. After graduating, she moved back home to Austin and continues to work with PODER.

When Jake Lowe was an undergrad at George Washington University, he spent a semester of late nights researching the troubling connection between the university’s Regulatory Studies Center and fossil fuel companies that advocated for deregulation. His report was published by the national organization UnKoch My Campus.

“That was what made me passionate about the whole issue of industry funding at universities,” says Lowe. But he wasn’t finished there. Last year, Lowe cofounded Fossil Free Research, a coalition of university students in the U.S., U.K., and Canada demanding that their institutions stop accepting research funding from oil and gas companies. The organization has chapters across about 40 campuses (and is soon rebranding to the Campus Climate Network).

Lowe and his team were inspired by the success of the divestment movement, which pushes universities to remove fossil fuel investments from their endowments. “A lot of the industry funding at universities has been able to go on unnoticed for a long time,” says Lowe. “So bringing it to the fore and forcing people to reckon with it is important.”

Fossil Free Research issued an open letter last year, now signed by more than 800 academics, calling for colleges and universities to cut ties with fossil fuel companies. At Cambridge University, students associated with Fossil Free Research occupied an institute named after British Petroleum. The university didn’t stop accepting BP money, but it did change the name of the center. “We’re starting to get some tiny wins here and there,” says Lowe.

Like the divestment movement, Lowe says, Fossil Free Research can make its biggest impact by engaging students and teaching them mobilization skills they can use long after they graduate. “It’s an avenue to get as many students on as many campuses as we can excited about the climate movement.”

Nancy Metzger-Carter was working as a STEM and sustainability teacher at a private high school when the Tubbs Fire ripped through Sonoma County in 2017. Three thousand students lost their homes.

After seeing how the fire impacted her students, Metzger-Carter knew her environmental teaching needed to go further. She joined Schools for Climate Action, or S4CA, a group founded by Sonoma County parents and educators after the fire to pass climate action resolutions in county schools. Today, she is the group’s campaign director, and S4CA has grown into a nationwide, youth-led effort to empower teachers and students to make their voices heard in climate policy.

In 2019, Metzger-Carter helped her students write a resolution for the California legislature declaring a climate emergency in the state. It passed. “They were like, ‘We didn’t know we could do that.’ And I was like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that, either, but why not?’” she says. They wrote a similar bill for Congress, which Representative Barbara Lee introduced on the House floor — although it gained 59 cosponsors, it did not come up for a vote.

Last spring, they rewrote the bill with input from students all over the country, and Metzger-Carter took more than 70 of them to the Capitol to advocate for it. It calls for more support for climate education, including an office for climate literacy within the Department of Education. “Students want to learn about climate change, teachers want to teach it, parents want to see it, yet it’s not happening,” Metzger-Carter says. “So how do we break down the barriers to get there?”

Roishetta Ozane grew up in Ruleville, Mississippi — the home of civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, who has inspired Ozane’s work as a community organizer. “I always feel like I have Miss Fannie Lou Hamer with me,” she says. Ozane’s mother and grandmother also set strong examples of how to be forces for good in the community.

It hasn’t always been easy. Ozane volunteered at her local women’s shelter in Louisiana even as she herself was experiencing domestic violence in her marriage. The pandemic made that situation worse. She knew she needed a change. In 2020, she got a divorce — the next year, she earned her bachelor’s degree and a job as a community organizer with Healthy Gulf. She had already witnessed the harm polluting industries cause in poor communities. “And one day I had an epiphany, that what’s at the core of the problem is race,” she says. “That’s why those facilities were in our communities.”

Ozane dove deep into environmental justice work. She has organized direct actions, including a flotilla of 20 shrimping boats outside a liquid natural gas summit in Lake Charles last year. In her current role with Texas Campaign for the Environment, she’s targeting finance. “If our governor isn’t fighting for us, and these projects are going to continue to get permits, how else can we stop them?” she says. “Well, they can’t build if they don’t have the money.” So far, she says, their effort has kept investors away from Driftwood LNG, a proposed natural gas terminal on the Calcasieu River.

Ozane also founded and runs The Vessel Project of Louisiana, a mutual-aid organization that helps people cover rent and other needs, expanding their capacity to advocate for themselves and plan for the future.

Precious Rideout had dreamed of becoming a public defender since she was in sixth grade. Much later, she realized that what she truly wanted to do was help people. “I thought I had to have a law degree in order to do that,” she says. But when she struggled to pass the LSAT, she instead went to work for the city government in her hometown of Las Vegas. Then she got an internship on Capitol Hill, working for Harry Reid, the senate majority leader at the time. “When I landed here,” she says, “I was like an alien in another world.”

After nearly five years on the Hill, she found her way into the nonprofit space — and the climate movement. In 2021, Rideout joined the Institute for Market Transformation, an organization focused on making buildings greener, healthier, and more resilient. Rideout leads a nascent body of work for the national org: engaging communities in policy development.

Recently, the Institute worked with the city of Orlando, Florida, to establish a building performance standard for decarbonization. “Typically we would just run headlong into working with the city to develop these policies,” says Rideout. Instead, her small team began building relationships with local community-based organizations to ensure residents had an opportunity to voice their needs and priorities. The group worked with the civic organization Poder Latinx on recommendations to guide Orlando’s decarbonization standard, suggesting things like creating a tenant-advocacy department and reducing residents’ energy burden. “Their involvement really has changed the trajectory of the policy,” Rideout says.

This year, Rideout launched a new initiative, Community Climate Shift, which is focused on redistributing resources to frontline communities so they can enact their own climate solutions. She also published a framework that has been more than two years in the making, offering guidance for other organizations like hers to engage with community stakeholders. Rideout calls it “a labor of love.”

The scale of the climate crisis was brought home for Elana Sulakshana when she visited relatives in South India as a teenager. “Until that point, I had thought about climate change as a polar bear issue,” she says. Seeing the impact of rising seas and frequent droughts on the coastal city of Chennai proved catalyzing. “I started to understand climate through socioeconomic and political lenses,” she says.

Sulakshana dove into climate organizing, and, about a year later, the fossil fuel divestment movement. That introduced her to the complex financial web between fossil fuel companies and global markets. She realized she’d have a greater impact tackling insurance, which underpins so many business decisions. “Without insurance, you can’t build anything,” she says. “That applies to new coal mines, or oil pipelines, or liquified natural gas export infrastructure, and so on.”

At the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Sulakshana helped build a campaign aimed at keeping U.S. insurance companies from backing fossil fuel projects. “We need to challenge the power of financial institutions in this country to illuminate the ways in which Wall Street is driving not only the climate crisis, but inequality and racial injustice,” she says. A major milestone was reached this spring, with the first major U.S. insurer, Chubb, adopting restrictions on insuring oil and gas.

Following that win, Sulakshana is ready to take her campaigning skills into a new sphere. For now, she’s still working with RAN in a consulting capacity — but she wants her next chapter to be at the intersection of climate and labor. “I think the climate movement has a lot to learn from the labor movement,” she says, and she believes that climate solutions can and should center workers’ rights and wellbeing.

The west side of Long Beach, California is surrounded by industry. Most would consider it a frontline community, but Taylor Thomas never saw anything unusual about it. “I had no idea that my neighborhood was any different from other neighborhoods, until I was a teenager,” they say, “when I started visiting friends who lived in nicer neighborhoods.”

Thomas, who was diagnosed with asthma at 7, was 22 when a friend encouraged them to attend an East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice meeting. “I realized that not only was the community that I grew up in experiencing all of this and there are other people living in similar circumstances, but that there’s an opportunity to change what we were experiencing,” they say. “I committed myself to doing this work from that point on.”

Thomas joined East Yard in 2014, and soon discovered a knack for helping colleagues and community members make sense of technical and arcane data. “I’m kind of like a ferret for information,” they say. By translating technical jargon into accessible information and enabling underrepresented communities to make themselves heard, Thomas influences policy shifts across California, including the Advanced Clean Fleets rule that will curb diesel emissions.

In the past, their advocacy has also come through in their work co-writing and performing in plays that explore the impacts of air pollution — a passion they hope to reignite. “Being able to see and participate in the arts can help a lot of people reframe how they live, what they’re experiencing, and how they can connect to spaces and people,” they say.

While attending community college, La’Meshia Whittington interviewed to be a manager at a poultry plant. Her mother and grandmother intervened. As royal descendants of The Kingdom of the Happy Land, a 19th-century Appalachian settlement of formerly enslaved people that had its own king and queen, the family had a long tradition of serving their community. They wanted her to do the same. She went to university, propelling herself into a career rooted in democratic and environmental justice. “I do whatever my people need, whenever they need it,” she says.

Whittington got involved with anti-gerrymandering efforts and traveled North Carolina registering people in Black communities to vote. She gained their trust, and when Hurricane Florence hit in 2018, some of those communities asked her for help. She facilitated volunteer boats and planes to rescue 250 people from floodwaters and coordinated a $2 million fund to assist hurricane victims.

Around that time, a local news story broke about dumping by chemical companies that caused PFAS contamination in the watershed around Wilmington and Fayetteville, North Carolina. “It was something I’d never heard of before, and I was like, ‘My folks need to know,’” she says. She held the first town hall on the matter to educate residents. “Everyone had hid it from them. I had people crying in the audience.”

Whittington began running community workshops across the state on the dangers of PFAS contamination. She led a petition to the EPA against the chemical company Chemours that laid the groundwork for the EPA’s “PFAS Strategic Roadmap,” a plan for the agency to better protect the public from contamination. She has also advised state councils on chemical contamination and contributed research for national guidelines on PFAS testing.

Today, Whittington runs a consulting firm advising organizations on how to prioritize environmental justice, and teaches classes on the subject. “Now, I do work in the poultry plant, but I’m on the other side,” she says.